WRITING ON MCLUHAN'S LIFE AND WORKS

The first rule for a biographer is to pick a subject who is dead
and who will therefore not contradict anything. Moreover, if the
subject is dead, he does not have to be interviewed, which is,
by and large, an advantage. The biographer is not subjected to
the temptation of always accepting the subject's version of any
particular episode in his life as the most authoritative one-a
temptation particularly acute when the biog-rapher knows that
the subject is a truthful man, as in the case of McLuhan. Not
only that, the silence of the dead man leaves gaps in information
which are an interesting challenge to fill in, using whatever
clues are at hand. The biographer is a kind of detective; it would
spoil the fun if the decedent, as they say in Perry Mason,
revived and solved every aspect of the mystery.

The other side of the coin, however, is that a biographer of a
deceased person will never know, this side of the grave, what
the subject actually thinks of his work. The biographer always
hopes-assuming he admires the subject, which is my own case-that
the subject would not have been entirely disapproving of that
work.

While working on Marshall McLuhan: The Medium And The Messenger
I kept thinking he would have been appalled at what I was doing.
I know, for example, that he would not have been amused by my
reading the diary he wrote as a 19 year old in Winnipeg, in which
he passed bitter judgement on his mother. At one point, he ended
a discussion of family problems in the diary with the sentence,
"I shall not bother to give any definite opinion on the matter,
as some interested party might one day find rich material here
for his own ends." It was an eerie experience to read that
sentence-myself being, at the time, certainly an "interested
party," and more than happy to use this "rich material"
for my dark ends.

Still, McLuhan was not opposed to biographies on principle. I
do not think he read a great many of them, but he did record in
the journal he kept throughout the 70s, for example, his experience
of reading Antonia Fraser's biography of Oliver Cromwell, which
he enjoyed. Anecdotes, he noted in that journal a propos Fraser's
book, made history readable. He had mixed feelings about the profiles
of him that appeared during his own lifetime. He was genuinely
amused and pleased by Tom Wolfe's famous 1965 profile in New
York magazine: he wrote the author and remarked, flatteringly,
that the experience of reading about his personal idiosyncracies
in the article gave him a foretaste of the embarassment one would
face in the presence of the Recording Angel. On the other hand,
he was disgusted at the superficiality of Barbara Rowes' 1976
profile in People magazine.

My qualifications to be a biographer of McLuhan were not impressive.
It is true that I was basically sympathetic to McLuhan, and not
repelled, for example, by his religion or politics, which many
people would consider reactionary. I myself am a papist, of the
sort who is not enthusiastic about the Sandinistas. As a biographer,
therefore, I could spare the reader any tut-tutting over McLuhan's
opinions on such matters.

My views were not always thus, by the way. The year I took McLuhan's
undergraduate course-1968/69-I was besotted with the world view
of the flower child. I produced an essay for that course in which
I linked Keats's advice to glut thy sorrow on a morning rose with
the pleasures of pot. The attitude expressed in the essay, if
I remember correctly, was a combination of late Victorian aestheticism
and hippie hedonism-both of which, as I know now but did not know
then, McLuhan despised. No wonder the essay got a poor mark. One
of the minor jolts I received, in fact, while working on the McLuhan
collection in the National Archives was finding the marks for
McLuhan's students in that year and discovering that I had the
lowest.

This leads to the question of the minimum qualification for a
McLuhan biographer, which is the intelligence to understand what
he was saying. I need not, here, get into the topic of McLuhan's
famous "incomprehensibility." That incomprehensibility,
first of all, mainly affected readers of his books who never had
the opportunity to see and hear McLuhan in action. Like many another
reader in the 60s, I started Understanding Media and never
finished it. (One of the pleasures of researching his biography
was discovering the proper method of reading McLuhan, the method
he himself recommended-i.e. "dipping into" his books
and meditating on a few sentences at a time, without trying to
read the books cover to cover.) His students did not find him
incomprehensible-at least, I think, most did not. His speech,
as he himself often noted, was more accessible than his prose-that
was mandarin-style, like the approved prose style of academia,
which he could effortlessly produce.

To be sure, students were aware of daunting intellectual standards
in McLuhan's class. I remember him expressing dismay, for example,
that not every student in the class had read William Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity. It was a miminum requirement
for anyone attempting to understand literature at our academic
level, he said. Subsequently I tried to read the book, and could
not get past the first five paragraphs. When I began work on the
biography, I gave the book a second chance and managed, at least,
to read it through. I have not mastered that book yet, however,
and I know that a third reading is necessary if I want to be a
truly qualified fourth year honours student in Eng. Lit. (I also
managed finally to get through Understanding Media).

The question of the biographer's intelligence is, let me say,
a delicate one. I will make only one comment on the subject. It
is well that a biographer be intelligent enough to appreciate
the subject, if the subject is a deep thinker, but not so intelligent-or
so vainglorious-that he fancies he can tell the world exactly
why and how the thinker got on the wrong track. This I did not
do in my biography. Nor did I fall into the trap of other McLuhan
critics by trying to be more hip than McLuhan-in particular, by
employing a smart, flippant prose style.

By trade I am a journalist, and have always cultivated a prose
that is "flowing" and accessible. Mandarin, if you will.
It is the kind of prose McLuhan often dismissed as a sleeping
pill for the mind. But I do not think it would have been wise
to attempt a biography in the kind of prose McLuhan admired-the
"multi-level" prose he told Gerald Stearn he himself
cultivated. Biographies may be many things, but they must be at
least moderately easy to read. And I think I have some warrant
from McLuhan himself for presenting him in uni-level, easy-to-read
format, as it were. He himself, as his popularity waned in the
70s, considered recasting his work in a more attention-getting
mode. As he wrote Tom Wolfe in 1971, "Have been tempted of
late to produce a sample chapter or two of Understanding Media
written with a private point of view and moral vehemence."

One special difficulty in the writing of my biography should be
mentioned. Because of the hostility of the McLuhan estate to the
enterprise, I could not expect to be granted permission to quote
anything of McLuhan's that was under the protection of copyright.
In some ways, this was not much of a problem. One of my strengths
as a biographer, I thought, was an ability precisely to translate
McLuhan's "multi-level" prose into more accessible,
more readable language. In general, McLuhan's mature prose is
so dense, one perception crowding another sometimes even in the
same sentence, that quoting more than one or two consecutive sentences
would not have been particularly advantageous. Readers generally
do not want to "meditate" over individual sentences
in a biography. They want one sentence to lead quickly to the
next, as in telling an anecdote, or in explaining something to
a mildly impatient listener. Chunks of McLuhan prose, in any sizeable
quantity, would have been indigestible in the main body of the
text.

Still, this effective prohibition on quotation did hurt the biography,
at least a little, when it came to pithy McLuhan quotes in letters,
diaries, journals, and so on-when McLuhan was delivering some
off the cuff remark on a person or a thing. I would have loved
to have presented these quotations as they were, in their exact
wording. In talking about the late psychologist R. D. Laing, for
example, in a letter to a friend, at the height of the Laing vogue
in 1970, McLuhan wrote,

He, of course, has devised a program of brain-washing people who
have any private identity so that by group therapy they can climb
aboard the tribal canoe. It is now a great big thing, full of
fairies, all paddling in different directions-mostly paddling
each other! It is a shame that he has no fun in him at all.

That last sentence, in particular, is beautifully characteristic
of McLuhan, who hated solemnity, self-importance, and misdirected
moral fervour of any kind. I had to reduce this comment to a single
sentence in a footnote in the book: "He (McLuhan) also dismissed
the work of psychologist R. D. Laing, which enjoyed a vogue in
the sixties, as a remorseless indoctrination in the joys of tribalism."
It wasn't the same.

Around the time I was writing the biography, the problem was particularly
acute because of U.S. court decisions that severely limited any
biographer's right not just to quote, but even to paraphrase copywritten
material. The major decision was the finding of a U.S. federal
court against Ian Hamilton, on behalf of the author J. D. Salinger,
whose biography Hamilton was trying to write against Salinger's
wishes. In order to get around copyright restrictions on use of
unpublished Salinger letters, Hamilton frequently tried to paraphrase
their content. For example, when Salinger wrote in a letter during
World War II something about Americans standing on tops of their
jeeps and taking a leak, Hamilton paraphrased it as something
like, the conquerers choosing to urinate from the roofs of their
vehicles. The judge said no. I certainly did not try to paraphrase
in this Hamiltonian sense, rendering McLuhan's often brilliant
one-liners in more ponderous and involved language.

In a way, it is paradoxical that such problems should have occurred
in the writing of a McLuhan biography. As Professor Alvin Kernan
observes in his book The Death Of Literature,

The concept of copyright appears only in a print society, since
in oral and even manuscript cultures, texts never stabilize sufficiently
to become an objective property. The wheel will have come full
circle when in some predictable future copyright will disappear
as the electronic database destabilizes the individual text once
again.

The law, however, is a conservative institution, and McLuhan's
printed texts have to be treated, from the legal point of view,
as are all printed texts in our culture, as the final and definitive
representation of a person's utterances, and as his private possession,
even after death.